SPIRIT Announces Availability of TeamSpirit® Voice&Video Engine For Residential V2oIP Media Phones

MOSCOW, Russia – February 10, 2009 – SPIRIT DSP, the world’s leading provider of embedded voice and video software engines, announced today that its TeamSpirit® Voice&Video Engine Embedded brings high quality real-time voice and video over IP (V2oIP) functionality to the promising phone form-factor – IP-based residential Media Phones.

Media Phone is a rapidly emerging device type, combining rich Internet experience with phone capabilities, a game changer for telecom industry, enabling roll-out of compelling IP-based services. New device offers what regular phones are unable to do: voice and video over IP calls along with a touchscreen to allow handy usage of daily Internet services such as weather forecast, ticket ordering, news feeds, etc. – all in a conventional and convenient form-factor of a base station and a DECT handset. The global market for Media Phones is estimated to be about 50 million units per year in 2013 with consumers being the major target market.

TeamSpirit® Voice&Video Engine Embedded powers the communication functionality of the first commercially available Media Phone on the worldwide market, providing carrier-grade voice and video over IP for Reigncom Wave Home product, an advanced touchscreen IP Media Phone. Reigncom Wave Home delivers multimedia, web and phone capabilities and is being promoted by the leading South Korean operator Korea Telecom for next generation value-added IP-based services within their SoIP (Services Over IP) strategy, with the target shipments of 5-6 million units in 2009-2010.

“POTS-only services have reached a limit, so IP-based residential Media Phone appears to be the way out for telcos in their struggle for customers and revenues: putting such device into customers’ homes is similar to obtaining a 7-inch interactive advertising space in every kitchen for numerous VAS,” stated Slava Borilin, VP Products of SPIRIT. “Virtually every leading carrier has a plan to introduce similar devices in 2009: Korea Telecom has already launched its first commercial model, powered by SPIRIT, and Verizon just announced this month its own “touch screen home phone system” named Verizon Hub. But it still remains a tough technical task for OEMs to combine visual Internet experience and high audio and video call quality in the one device. The only way to pass demanding operators’ quality tests and secure positive user-experience with VoIP is to rely on ”smart” carrier-grade VoIP software solutions, able to fight echo, noise and last mile congestions. And that’s exactly what SPIRIT delivers.”

“iRiver has always been an innovator – both in user features set and design,” – stated Justin Hwang, VP Products of Reigncom. “To keep pace with today’s rapidly growing and very demanding personal communication and home entertainment market, we need to work with industry leaders – that’s why we have chosen SPIRIT. We would like to emphasize the high quality and excellent integration support we received from SPIRIT.”

SPIRIT’s Voice&Video Engine Embedded is a comprehensive pre-integrated software suite, available on a wide range of platforms including Intel Atom, ARM9E/11, ARM Cortex A8, Marvell PXA, TI OMAP3. A library of highly optimized, low-MHz speech and video codecs, voice and video synchronization tools, speech enhancement algorithms and network optimizing functionality effectively solve all IP-immanent issues, including echo and noise, delay (jitter), packet loss and last mile congestion. SPIRIT engine has low resource consumption, which results in lower processor load, allowing users to multitask, running several applications simultaneously.

Find out more details at: www.spiritdsp.com/solutions/voice-video_for_media-phones.html

About SPIRIT

SPIRIT DSP (www.spiritDSP.com) is the world’s leading provider of carrier-grade voice & video software engines since 1996. SPIRIT communication software is used in over 80 countries and powers more than 100 million voice channels. SPIRIT counts among its direct customers Adobe, ARM, AT&T, Blizzard, BT, China Mobile, Cisco, Ericsson, HP, HTC, Huawei, Korea Telecom, Kyocera, LG, Microsoft, NEC, Oracle, Polycom, Radvision, Samsung, Siemens, Skype, Texas Instruments, Toshiba, ZTE, and 200+ other telcos, OEMs and software vendors. SPIRIT smart-phone OEM customers’ shipments jointly exceed 60% share of the global market.